The Iron Game eBook

Jack lay quite still and raised his eyes. Above
him stood a trooper, with a revolver leveled at and
within ten feet of him. Figure to yourself any
predicament in life in which vital stakes hang on the
issue; figure to yourself the shipwrecked seizing ice
where he had hoped for timber; the condemned criminal
walking into the jailer’s toils where he had
laboriously dug through solid walls; the captain of
an army leaving the field victor, to find his legions
rushing upon him in rout; figure any monstrous overturn
in well-laid schemes, and you have but a faint reflex
of poor Jack’s heart-breaking anguish when this
jocular fate stood above him, with the five gaping
barrels pointed at his miserable head. Oh, if
Dick had only been there! His quick eye and keen
activity would have discovered this lurking devil;
perhaps, between them, they would have averted the
disaster. Where could Dick be?

BOOK III

THE DESERTERS.

CHAPTER XXIV.

BETWEEN THE LINES.

On quitting Jack, Dick had but one thought in mind—­to
make his departure less abrupt for Rosa. If he
left her without a word, what would she think?
Then, with an officer’s uniform, he could be
of much more help to Jack and the party than in the
rough civilian homespun furnished at the cabin.
Besides, he knew of certain blank headquarter passes
lying on Vincent’s desk. He would get a
few of these; they might extricate the party in the
event of a surprise.

He tore over the solemn roadway, under the spectral
foliage, and in twenty minutes he was in his room
in the Atterburys’. Vincent’s old
uniform he had often noticed in a spare closet adjoining
his own sleeping-room. In an instant he was in
it, and, though it was not a fit, he soon put it in
order to pass casual inspection. The line for
Rosa was the next delay. What should he say?
He had had his mind full for days of the most tender
sentiments and prettily turned phrases, but the turmoil
of the last hour, the vital value of every moment to
Jack’s plans, left him no time to compose the
poem he had meditated so long. Rosa’s own
pretty desk was open, and on a sheet of her own paper
he wrote, in a scrawling, school-boy hand:

“DARLING ROSA: You’ve often said
that you would disown Vincent if he were not true
to the South. Think of Vincent in my place—­dawdling
in Acredale or Washington while battles were going
on. You would not hold him less contemptible
that he was in love; that he let his love, or his
life, for you are both to me, stand as a barrier to
his duty. You can’t love where you can’t
honor, and you can’t hate where you know conscience
rules. I go to my duty, that in the end I may
come to you without shame. I ask no pledge other
than comes to your heart when you read this; but whatever
you may say, whatever you may decide, I am now and
always shall be your devoted